Top Unhappy Person Quotes

Favorite Unhappy Person Quotes

1. "Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person."Author: Alain De Botton

2. "My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do."Author: Anne Stevenson

3. "To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour."Author: Anthony Doerr

5. "Being an unhappy person does not mean you must be sad or dark. You can be interested instead of happy. You can be fascinated instead of happy."Author: Augusten Burroughs

6. "She had recently come to think that in such unhappy times-when the odds were so high against personal happiness-to find love was miraculous, and to fulfill it as best as two people could was what really mattered. Was it more important to insist a man's religious beliefs be exactly hers, or that the two of them have in common ideals, a desire to keep love in their lives, and to preserve in every possible way what was best in themselves? The less difference among people, the better; thus she settled it for herself yet was dissatisfied for those for whom she hadn't settled it,"Author: Bernard Malamud

7. "My power is that I can always tell when someone is unhappy, even if that person is pretending to be happy and is a really good actor. The bad thing about my power is that I always try to do something to make the sad person feel better—even if I should probably leave it alone and not do anything at all. Dad says that feeling people's sadness is called empathy and it's a superpower because of the "having to do something to help them feel better" part. A superhero has to help people in trouble. She can't just change into a regular I'm-not-going-to-do-anything-to help-someone-else type of person even if she wanted to."Author: Charise Mericle Harper

8. "Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit.Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams--like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams."Author: David Mamet

9. "I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art."Author: Edith Sitwell

10. "A generous intercourse of charity united the most distant provinces, and the smaller congregations were cheerfully assisted by the alms of their more opulent brethren. Such an institution, which paid less regard to the merit than to the distress of the object, very materially conduced to the progress of Christianity. The Pagans, who were actuated by a sense of humanity, while they derided the doctrines, acknowledged the benevolence of the new sect. The prospect of immediate relief and of future protection allured into its hospitable bosom many of those unhappy persons whom the neglect of the world would have abandonned to the miseries of want, of sickness, and of old age. There is some reason likewise to believe, that great numbers of infants, who, according to the inhuman practice of the times, had been exposed by their parents, were frequently rescued from death, baptised, educated, and maintained by the piety of the Christians, and at the expense of the public treasure."Author: Edward Gibbon

11. "The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing what to do with their time. But if you have more projects than you have time for, you are not going to be an unhappy person. This is as much a question of having imagination and curiosity as it is of actually making plans."Author: Eleanor Roosevelt

12. "Happiness, she would explain, was when a person felt good, light, creative, content, loving and loved, and free. An unhappy person felt as if there were barriers crushing her desires and the talents she had inside. A happy woman was one who could exercise all kinds of rights, from the right to move to the right to create, compete, and challenge, and at the same time could be loved for doing so. Part of happiness was to be loved by a man who enjoyed your strength and was proud of your talents. Happiness was also about the right to privacy, the right to retreat from the company of others and plunge into contemplative solitude. Or sit by yourself doing nothing for a whole day, and not give excuses or feel guilty about it either. Happiness was to be with loved ones, and yet still feel that you existed as a separate being, that ou were not just there to make them happy. Happiness was when there was a balance between what you gave and what you took."Author: Fatema Mernissi

13. "The pretty ones are usually unhappy. They expect everyone to be enamored of their beauty. How can a person be content when their happiness lies in someone else's hands, ready to be crushed at any moment? Ordinary-looking people are far superior, because they are forced to actually work hard to achieve their goals, instead of expecting people to fall all over themselves to help them."Author: J. Cornell Michel

14. "Ultimately though, we are not responsible for another's happiness. The unhappy person almost always suffers from self-inflicted pain."Author: James Dillehay

15. "If sinners were so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life. It wasn't like I didn't know where all this remembering got you, all that hunger for beauty and astonishing cruelty and ever-present loss. But I knew I would never go to Bill with a troubling personal matter, a boy who liked me too much, a teacher who scolded unfairly. I had already seen more of the world, its beauty and misery and sheer surprise, than they could hope or fear to perceive."Author: Janet Fitch

16. "You don't seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help."Author: Jean Kerr

17. "The really unhappy person is the one who leaves undone what they can do, and starts doing what they don't understand; no wonder they come to grief."Author: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

18. "What you must understand about me is that I'm a deeply unhappy person."Author: John Green

19. "I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers."Author: Jonathan Franzen

20. "Very well, let's see. I'm very sympathetic about your having left Raffin. I think you're brave to have defied Randa as you did with that Ellis fellow; I don't know if I could've gone through with it. I think you have more energy than anyone I've ever encountered, though I wonder if you aren't a bit hard on your horse. I find myself wondering why you haven't wanted to marry Giddon, and if it's because you've intended to marry Raffin, and if so, whether you're even more unhappy to have left him than I realized. I'm very pleased you've come with me. I'd like to see you defend yourself for real, fight someone to the death, for it would be a thrilling sight. I think my mother would take to you. My brothers, of course, would worship you. I think you're the most quarrelsome person I've ever met. And I really do worry about your horse."Author: Kristin Cashore

21. "You weren't that unhappy. "Contrast him with the Air Corps man of the same education and longevity," Stouffer wrote. His chance of getting promoted to officer was greater than 50 percent. "If he had earned a [promotion], so had the majority of his fellows in the branch, and his achievement was less conspicuous than in the MP's. If he had failed to earn a rating while the majority had succeeded, he had more reason to feel a sense of personal frustration, which could be expressed as criticism of the promotion system." Stouffer's point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally—by comparing ourselves to people "in the same boat as ourselves." Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This is one of those observations that is both obvious and (upon exploration) deeply profound, and it explains all kinds of otherwise puzzling observations. Which do you"Author: Malcolm Gladwell

22. ". . .with the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus."Author: Marcel Proust

23. "A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person."Author: Milan Kundera

24. "I know that they're all unhappy because nobody loves the right person the way they should and because they don't understand that it's really their own self that they're mad at."Author: Muriel Barbery

25. "The Soviet state was, in fact, almost perfectly designed to make people unhappy. It denied its citizens not just hope, but also trust. Every activity had to be sanctioned by the state. Any person could be an informant. No action could be guaranteed to be without consequence. Father Dmitry preached friendship and warmth and belief to his parishioners, and inspired a generation to live as humans and not as parts of a machine."Author: Oliver Bullough

26. "It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions—objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas."Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

27. "The thing is, when I had my first success it did coincide with the end of my first marriage, and because I went on to have a very, very unhappy two years, I don't think I equate career success with personal happiness."Author: Rob Brydon

28. "Why does anyone stay in an unhappy relationship? Because people do. They do it all the time. And the truth is, when you're in it, when you're up to your neck in the everyday part of life with another human being, sometimes you don't exactly notice how bad things really are. It's not always as apparent as it would seem. Unhappiness, when it involves another person, can be like that line from The Sun Also Rises about going bankrupt, how it happens two ways: gradually, and then suddenly."Author: Sarah Dunn

29. "I don't know what game you and geek boy are playing, Gautier. But you get in my way as I leave and I'll wipe my boots on your balls. (Brett)Before he realized what was happening, Simi had taken Brett's hand and squeezed it so hard Nick heard the bones break.) Nick is a friend of the Simi's. You threaten him and you make the Simi really unhappy and want to eat your head. Trust me, not something you want me to think about. Now go away mean person or the Simi will tell akri she don't know what happened to you and your masticated form. Not that I like to lie, but there are deceptions to every rule. And you're about to become one. Now get in there and be quiet. (Simi)"Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

30. "What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music."Author: SOREN KIERKEGAARD

31. "When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence."Author: Tom Robbins

32. "The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously."Author: Tom Robbins

33. "Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as ‘important' only if ‘tis sober and severe. Sure and still you're right about your Cheerful Dum, only they're not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence."Author: Tom Robbins

34. "Among these temperamentally unhappy campers are "reactant" personalities, who focus on what they often wrongly perceive as others' attempts to control them. In one experiment, some of these touchy individuals were asked to think of two people they knew: a bossy sort who advocated hard work and a mellow type who preached la dolce vita. Then, one of the names was flashed before the subjects too briefly to register in their conscious awareness. Next, the subjects were given a task to perform. Those who had been exposed to the hard-driving name performed markedly worse than those exposed to the easygoing name. Even this weak, subliminal attention to an emotional cue that suggested control was enough to get their reactant backs up and cause them to act to their own disadvantage. All relationships involve give-and-take and cooperation, so a person who habitually attends to ordinary requests or suggestions like a bull to a red flag is in for big trouble in both home and workplace."Author: Winifred Gallagher